Philosophy of the Performing Arts

performance art and the performing arts 203
(5) “Activity, 23 days, varying durations. New York City. Choosing a person at
random, in the street, any location, each day. Following him wherever he goes,
however long or far he travels. (The activity ends when he enters a private
place – his home, office, etc.)”
This description identifies Following Piece by Vito Acconci. The execution of
this piece by Acconci in 1969 is documented by photographs that accompany
the description of the piece in galleries where the work is presented (see
Acconci 2004).
(6) “Drill a hole into the heart of a large tree and insert a microphone. Mount
the amplifier and speaker in an empty room and adjust the volume to make
audible any sound that might come from the tree.”
This description identifies a September 1969 piece by Bruce Naumann,
which featured in a 1970 exhibition entitled Art in the Mind (see Lippard
1973, 162–163). The described action was not, as far as I know, actually
performed, by Naumann or anyone else.
(7) “Draw an imaginary map ... Go walking on an actual street according to
the map.”
This piece was one of Yoko Ono’s contributions to the exhibition Infor-
mation staged at MOMA in New York in summer 1970 (see Goldberg 2001,
154). It differs from earlier examples in at least two respects. First, it pro-
poses that the visitor to the exhibition herself be the executor of the piece,
rather than its being executed by the artist herself, as in Acconci’s case, or by
others assigned to the task, as with LeWitt’s wall drawings. In this respect,
it resembles Janet Cardiff’s “Walks.” Visitors to exhibitions of Cardiff’s work
are given headphones and (for video “Walks”) a small video camera. The
headphones provide instructions for walking a specific route, but intercut
into these instructions is a fiction by Cardiff involving things encountered on
the route. In the video “Walks,” the video screen illustrates the fictional nar-
rative by presenting scenarios enacted at the very location occupied by the
person who executes the work by following the prescriptions given on the
headphones. Second, and more significantly, it is questionable whether it is
possible to perform Yoko Ono’s work. The prescriptions seem impossible to
fulfill if one understands walking “according to” a map as a matter of follow-
ing it. For how can one follow an imaginary map on an actual street? At best,
one can come up with some way of reinterpreting the details of the map to
make them apply to the street in question.